December 14, 2009

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A federal judge in Wilmington, Delaware sentenced an Iranian citizen to five years prison today in a case that some export control lawyers said may set a troubling precedent.

Amir Hossein Ardebili was an Iranian procurement official inside of Iran when Philadelphia-based U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents lured him in a sting to Tbilisi, Georgia in 2007. There, he was arrested, and secretly extradited to the United States, where he was held in solitary confinement from January until May 2008 when he pled guilty to U.S. export control violations.

After his plea, the Justice Department continued to secretly hold Ardebili in solitary confinement in a maximum security Philadelphia federal prison for another 19 months, until the Justice Department unsealed the indictment against him earlier this month, ahead of Ardebili's sentencing hearing today. The Justice Department says the secrecy was warranted because the U.S. government was pursuing leads on potential other cases it got from material in Ardebili's possession when he was arrested.

Ardebili's sentencing today comes as Iranian officials said they would try three American hikers who accidentally wandered into Iran while hiking on unmarked trails in northern Iraq last July.

POLITICO previously reported that Iranian officials have linked the case of the three Americans -- Sarah Shourd, 31, Josh Fattal, 27, and Shane Bauer, 27 -- to a list of Iranians that includes Ardebili that Tehran says were illegally charged or detained by the United States. Swiss diplomats - who serve as kind of diplomatic intermediaries for the U.S. in Tehran -- have told U.S. officials that Iranian officials have raised the list of Iranians in connection with the hikers' case, a senior administration official confirmed to POLITICO.

The U.S. has asked Iran to release the three hikers on humanitarian grounds. It has also sought the release of Iranian American scholar Kian Tajbakhsh, sentenced by Iran to twelve years prison in the post-elections crackdown, and information on a former FBI agent, Robert Levinson, who has been missing since a meeting on Kish island for almost three years.

Some export control lawyers said the Ardebili case may have set a troubling precedent, because it sought to prosecute and lure abroad an Iranian inside Iran for violating U.S. export control laws.

"What's most interesting here is the U.S. effort to expand, seemingly without limit, claims of U.S. jurisdiction over activities by foreign citizens which are performed in their own countries and which are legal in those countries," Clif Burns, an export control attorney with Bryan Cave said.

Americans would be "apoplectic" if the reverse scenario occurred, Burns posited.

"What would be the response if Iranian agents abducted the CEO of Twitter while he was in, say, the UAE, dumped him into solitary confinement in an Iranian prison, and secretly indicted him with aiding and abetting sedition by Iranian dissenters?" he said. "The U.S. government and the general U.S. population would be apoplectic and would be citing the very same provisions of international law that the U.S. wants to ignore in the case of Aberdili."

Also potentially troubling was the fact that the U.S. had held Ardebili in secret for two years, including four months in solitary confinement before he made his guilty plea.

The Justice Department did not acknowledge any excesses in the handling of the case.

"The case was kept under court seal to protect the integrity of other investigations that were spawned by the arrest of Ardebeli and the recovery of extensive information from materials in his possession," Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd told POLITICO. "Keeping court documents under seal to protect ongoing law enforcement investigations from being compromised occurs frequently in the criminal justice system."

Ardebili was "lawfully arrested and extradited from a foreign nation," Boyd added, "appeared immediately before a US District Court Judge upon" his extradition to the United States, and "was represented by an experienced criminal defense attorney."

Ardebili reportedly sobbed at his sentencing hearing today and had to take a break from reading a statement in which he expressed remorse and asked for mercy. Chief Judge Gregory M. Sleet acknowledged Ardebili's remorse, before sentencing him to a term of incarceration of 60 months, with credit for time served.

Ardebili's five year sentence is relatively lenient given the charges he pled to, said export control attorney Douglas Jacobson. "The maximum penalty of violating the Arms Export Control Act is 10 years and violations of [the Treasury Department Office of Foreign Asset Control's] Iranian Transactions Regulations is 20 years," Jacobson explained. "He has been in custody since October 2, 2007 and in federal prison since Jan. 20, 2008."

Under U.S. sentencing guidelines for export violations, the range for a first time offender would be a sentence of 63-78 months.

"If I were the judge, I'm not so sure I'd have accepted a plea that was only made after 2 years of secret imprisonment unless I was absolutely convinced that the US government hadn't told the guy that they'd lock him up forever if he didn't plead guilty," Burns said.

UPDATE: Not exactly James Bond. Ardebili's lawyer points out that Ardebili's trip to Georgia was his first trip out of Iran, he lives at his parents home, he came to Tbilisi with his dad, and he could not come up with the $10,000 downpayment for the technology he was improperly trying to buy. The ICE agents, who seem to feel they have managed to catch Osama bin Laden, put the video of their sting on Youtube. Who supervised this case?

Ardebili was held in solitary confinement from January 2008 until now -- two years. Article previously said he had been in solitary confinement from January to May 2008 when he gave his guilty plea, but he was in fact kept in solitary confinement for 22 months, since arriving in the United States.